Tuesday, June 24, 2008

"The Pathology of the U.S. Economy Revisited" by Michael Perelman. Talks about the housing bubble and the easy credit bubble, the structural reasons for the stagnation of the U.S. economy. Here's the catch: it was published in 2002. I read it as part of a class taught by a radical political economist in 2004. Unfortunately, it's a textbook, so it costs.

Perelman comes at his subject from an interesting perspective. He's part of the tradition of Marxist-Keynesian economists, people who blend Marx's economic and political economic writings with the economic analysis of John Maynard Keynes, probably the most important economist of the 20th century. It's not ideological, but just interesting economics.

The downside is that the U.S. economy is entering a structural crisis of its own unconscious devising. Our economic miracle in the post war world was created not by some real special superiority on the part of how U.S. capitalism works but by the fact that Europe and Asia was destroyed by World War II and therefore were not in any position to compete.